The Fanatics of Al Asad Read online

  I didn't let the looks of the door fool me. I'd been there before. The inside of that door was lined with sheet steel and had three locks — one of them a Fox police lock with a solid steel rod that hooked into the door and was anchored to the floor. Nothing short of a fire-axe or acetylene torch was going to take down that door — and, even then, it would take five to ten minutes to do it.

  I heard footsteps. Then a pause. I knew someone was looking at me through the small one-way mirror of the peephole. I heard bolts being drawn back; the door finally opened.

  A slender, young black man stood in the doorway. His face wore a big smile.

  "Hey, man!" he exclaimed delightedly as he pulled me inside. He slammed and locked the door shut behind me. Turning, he said, "Gimme five, man!"

  I slapped palms with him.

  "You're up early," I remarked.

  "Feel up today," he announced. "Feelin' high today, man! Kinda day to feel that way, right?"

  I nodded.

  He canted his head and stared at me.

  "Ain't no social visit, is it?" he asked.

  I shook my head. "No, it isn't. You still pushing, Duane?"

  His lips cracked in a big smile.

  "Ain't sayin' yes, ain't sayin' no," he said. "How come you ask that?"

  "It's important," I told him.

  "Come an' sit down. We ain't had a heavy rap for, hey, must be a couple of years!"

  I didn't move.

  "I asked if you were still pushing," I said again.

  Duane's smile disappeared. "You gonna bug me?"

  "No. I just want to know if you still have contacts."

  Duane nodded slowly. "I got me all the contacts I need."

  I looked around the room. It was still as ratty as it had been two years earlier when I had gotten Duane off a police bust because of the help he'd given me. He faced a ten- to fifteen-year stretch. He didn't even get probation. Duane hadn't forgotten it.

  "How're you doing, Duane?"

  "Fine, man." He caught my eyes roaming over the crummy living room and burst out laughing. "Hey, man, this ain't my pad! I gotta take you there sometime. This is just where I wheel and deal."

  "And cut the stuff? And bag it?"

  Duane shrugged, amused. "It's how I make my bread. You know how it goes, man."

  "You dealing in hard stuff, Duane?"

  His eyes got cold. "You mean horse man? The big H? Real hard shit?"

  I nodded.

  "No way. Just pot and some coke."

  "That doesn't make you a big dealer," I prodded at his self-esteem and pride.

  "Big enough so's I don't have to peddle bags. Get yourself too big, you get busted. You don't get busted, the big boys come after you, they want a piece of your action. Me, I'm just the right size. Don't get hassled by nobody."

  His eyes began to show an uncomfortable look.

  "Hey, man, I was feelin' real up just before you come in. Had me a nice high goin'. Now, you bringin' me down," he accused.

  "I want help from you," I said.

  "What kinda help?" He was wary. I knew he was going to be difficult to deal with if he got more depressed.

  "Take a snort," I said, "and we'll talk about it."

  "Not so sure I have any 'round," he said cautiously.

  "I'm not here to bust you, Duane. You know that."

  "Yeah," he admitted grudgingly. "I know that."

  "Then go take a snort."

  Duane suddenly grinned at me. "Don't have to go nowhere," he said, taking a small phial out of his pocket. He pulled at the thin, gold chain looped around his neck. At the end of it hung a miniature spoon. Carefully, he untwisted the top of the vial, dipping out a tiny spoonful of white, crystalline powder. He held it to one nostril, inhaling strongly. The powder disappeared. He did the same to his other nostril. Then he repeated the process.

  "You taking two and two now?" I asked, meaning two snorts for each nostril.

  Duane nodded. "Got more kick that way, man. Seems like I need it with all the heavy hasslin' goin' round."

  He held out the vial and the spoon. "You want some? My treat. It's the best around."

  I shook my head. "You know I don't touch it, Duane."

  "It's really good stuff, man," he said.

  I had no reason to doubt that Duane's stuff wasn't good. Big chemical companies… make it legally under license by the United States government for hospital and medicinal use. It gets into illegal channels by theft from drug wholesalers, druggists and hospitals. It's highly refined cocaine and therefore has a pure, white crystalline powder form. You can see tiny, sharp crystals in the powder. It can be cut with milk sugar to a greater degree than can other cocaine. Most of the cocaine brought into the States illegally comes from South America. It's not completely refined and has a brownish tinge to it, and it isn't as potent. But every pusher brags that his stuff is pure mere whether it is or not.

  "Forget it," I said. "I told you I want your help."

  "You got it, if I can give it," Duane said cautiously.

  "I'm looking for a group of Arabs," I said. I told him about Al Asad. That is, as much as I thought he should know.

  "Them the mothers that killed the President and Veep yesterday?" He was shocked.

  "They are." I told him I thought they were holed up in Manhattan. "I want to find them."

  "Ay-rabs!" said Duane in amazement. "What I got to do with Ay-rabs? Nothin', man! I don't know no Ayrabs!"

  "You've got contacts," I said. "I want the word spread through every pusher you know — and through everyone he deals with. Dig? Anyone sees or hears or even smells anything out of the ordinary, I want word to get back to you like right now! And you get that word to me!"

  Duane started to grin. "Shee-it!" he exclaimed. "You askin' me to help the fuzz? Man, where's your head at?"

  "I'm asking you to help me, Duane."

  He stopped laughing. Carefully, he considered the statement before he committed himself. Finally, he nodded his head.

  "Right on! Under that honky skin, man, you a brother. That's why I'm gonna do it."

  We slapped palms again.

  "One more favor, Duane," I said.

  He eyed me askance.

  "Who's top pimp, now?" I asked. "I want to talk to him, too."

  Duane shook his head admiringly.

  "Man, you goin' all the way! Cat named Wesley — he's top pimp. Least, he got the biggest stable."

  "I didn't say the biggest stable, Duane. I want the man with the best stable. All high class chicks. No one out on the street. Call girls. The ones with the best clientele — like United Nations diplomats."

  "Um-m-m," said Duane. "I dig. That's still Wesley. All that cat's got is top girls. Got 'em each her own apartment. Every one of them's on the East Side. You see some of them foxes, you never believe they're in the fife!"

  "Can you set it up for me?"

  Duane nodded. "Yeah. You be where I can call you 'round five o'clock. Let you know then."

  He walked me to the door and unbolted each of the three locks. I walked down the steps, past the two blacks and the Puerto Ricans, who eyed me coldly a second time but made no move.

  * * *

  Thursday. 2:11 p.m. East 53rd Street

  Frank DeGiullio came out of the restaurant, his bodyguard a step behind him, and turned east away from Madison Avenue toward Park. He was balding and the slight wind ruffled his hair. He put up his hand to smooth down the few strands. DeGiullio was about five-nine, stocky, and dressed expensively in a custom tailored suit. His shoes were handmade. So was his necktie.

  His bodyguard was well over six feet tall, in his early thirties and muscled like a wrestler.

  I fell into step behind them. There weren't many pedestrians. We walked about half a block that way, then, suddenly, I cut in front of the bodyguard, muttered an apology for bumping into him, and, as he continued walking, I stuck out my leg and tripped him.

  He stumbled. Pretending I was trying to catch him, I grabbed him by
the collar of his jacket and ran him off-balance across the sidewalk head first into a light pole. The sound of his skull ramming into the steel pole was like a melon being struck with a bat. He collapsed in a tangled heap of arms and legs. When a big man goes down, people notice it. DeGiullio stopped and spun around, glaring. I held out my hands apologetically.

  DeGiullio knelt quickly beside his man. Half a dozen people gathered around. Two of them bent solicitously over the unconscious body. I came up close to DeGiullio and touched him in the back of the neck. His head twisted quickly so that he stared into my right hand only inches away from his face.

  What he saw was the short barrel of a small .32 caliber Beretta automatic pistol. The rest of the gun was in my fist, hidden from the view of the gathering crowd.

  "Let's go, Frank," I said softly. My words carried only a short distance. It was far enough. DeGiullio looked up into my face.

  "What the hell…"

  "Now!" I said. "Unless you want it right here, Frank."

  DeGiullio didn't even bother to shrug. He rose to his feet, dusted off the crease in his trousers and walked along beside me.

  "Whose beef is it?" he asked, looking straight ahead and talking out of the side of his mouth. "I can square it, if somebody got a beef. I got influence."

  "Not enough. Just shut up and let's get to your car."

  DeGiullio owned a black Mercury sedan. His bodyguard usually drove it, only he wasn't around right now to perform that chore.

  The car was parked in a no parking zone, but that didn't mean anything to a guy like DeGiullio. Nor did the parking tickets he got. We climbed in and started off through the traffic.

  "You gonna tell me what this is all about?" DeGiullio asked, nervously.

  "Keep driving."

  We worked our way through the heavy traffic of mid-Manhattan, then through the Queens Midtown Tunnel to the Long Island Expressway.

  Every once in awhile, DeGiullio would start to say something, and I'd press the muzzle of the Beretta against his temple. After a while, his forehead was wet with glistening drops of sweat.

  We took Francis Lewis Boulevard, crossing Northern Boulevard, into Flushing and close to the College Point area. We drove around for a long time until I found what I wanted — a dead end, an almost deserted street with a few old, abandoned buildings.

  "Pull over," I said abruptly.

  DeGiullio stopped the car. He looked around, not liking what he saw.

  "This a hit?" His voice could barely make it out of his dry throat.

  "Get out," I told him.

  DeGiullio got out of the car. As he did so, I slid over behind him and shoved him hard with my leg, the flat of the sole catching him in the middle of his back. He went stumbling helplessly to the ground.

  I let him get to his knees. This time I had Wilhelmina, my 9 mm. Luger in my fist and that is a mean looking gun. It's big. It was built to do just one thing — kill.

  DeGiullio looked at the muzzle of the pistol I held only inches away from his forehead. I stood over him, my legs spread apart. There's a terrible psychological advantage you have when you stand that way over a man who's down on both knees. You strip him of every vestige of his pride and manhood. You've degraded him as completely as a man can be degraded, because he sees himself as being thoroughly helpless at the same time he sees you as being totally powerful. There's also a sexual connotation that he can't help being aware of no matter how hard he tries to shove it out of his mind. For a man like DeGiullio, brought up in a culture that stresses machismo, it is the most sickening feeling of all.

  DeGiullio's hand-tailored suit was grimy. Patches of sweat had soaked through the armpits of his jacket. His sharp body odor seeped through his clothes, stinking of fright.

  I swung the barrel of the Luger down across his collar bone because I didn't want to mark up his face, but that's a painful place to hit someone. It can paralyze the entire arm if you do it hard enough.

  DeGiullio let out a moan. He shut his eyes.

  "Open your eyes, Frank."

  He looked up at me, fearfully. His collar tabs were turned up, his necktie knot was awry. "You want me to beg?" he asked brokenly. "Okay, I'm begging."

  "You want to live, Frank?"

  He swallowed hard and nodded.

  "Enough to do what I tell you?"

  Again he nodded.

  "I want you to take me to Big Sal."

  "Oh, Jesus," whispered DeGiullio. "He'll kill me!"

  "So will I."

  "You got a contract on him?" DeGiullio asked hoarsely.

  "You ask too many questions. I told you I want you to take me to Big Sal. What's the difference if he kills you or I kill you? You're just as dead."

  DeGiullio measured me with his narrowed eyes. In spite of his fear, his shrewd mind began to figure the odds. I knew exactly what he was thinking. The longer he could stay alive, the better were his chances of getting away from me.

  "You want me to take you to him — or you want me to bring him to you?"

  "Don't play games, Frank. I'm not dumb enough to let you go just because you're going to tell me you'll get Salvatore. I said I want you to take me to him."

  "Big Sal never leaves the office except to go home," he said. "There's maybe ten, fifteen guys around the place all the time. You'll never make it. You gotta be nuts."

  "I'll make it," I said tersely. "Are you going to take me to him?"

  DeGiullio made up his mind. I could see him figuring that the odds in favor of his staying alive were a lot better if he could get me to where he could count on help.

  "I'll take you," he said quickly.

  "Get up."

  We walked over to the car. DeGiullio brushed himself off as best he could and started to get in.

  "Wait a minute, Frank," I said, putting a hand on his arm to stop him. "I want to show you something."

  I pointed out an empty, one-quart motor oil can lying on top of a broken wooden box. "You see that?" He nodded.

  "Watch," I said, and swung the Luger and fired and swung it back to his head again in one quick motion.

  I had a load of hollow point cartridges in the pistol clip. A hollow point is a nasty bullet. It mushrooms the second it hits anything — a tin can, a body or a human head. The can literally exploded into the air, ripped apart by the impact of the bullet.

  DeGiullio's eyes grew wide. He swallowed hard.

  "I got the idea," he said. "I don't need no more convincing."

  We drove back through Queens and took the expressway to Brooklyn, DeGiullio's confidence growing with every mile we drove. We finally wound up in a warehouse section of town near the waterfront. DeGiullio drove across a broken, asphalt paved parking lot and around behind the building.

  As we walked in through a side door, half a dozen men looked up at us. DeGiullio paid no attention to them.

  "That's the door," he said, as we walked toward it. My Luger was concealed under my coat.

  "You first," I said.

  I closed it behind me. Two men were in the office. They looked at DeGiullio's face and started to reach inside their jackets for their guns.

  I let them look at Wilhelmina and said, "Don't."

  They froze.

  "It's no hit," I told them. "Just tell Big Sal to come out."

  They looked at each other. One of them nodded to the other and picked up an interoffice telephone. He spoke quietly into it in Sicilian.

  The office door opened a second later and a short, chunky young man walked out. He looked at me appraisingly, taking in the Luger in my hand, DeGiullio's frightened face and the quietly waiting two men.

  "Who the shit are you?" he asked bluntly.

  "Tell Big Sal I want to talk to him. Tell him it's Nick Carter. He knows me."

  The chunky young man walked back into the office leaving the door open. A moment later I heard a big, booming, angry roar, and then Big Sal was in the doorway.

  The reason they call him Big Sal is because of his weight. He's only about fi
ve-feet-seven-inches in height, but he weighs close to two hundred and eighty pounds — all of it fat. He has triple chins that reach almost all the way around his fat throat and spill over onto his shirt collar. His suit bulges at the seams. He's a balloon mounted on sausage legs with sausage arms bursting his sleeves. And he's completely bald.

  Big Sal said, "Hello, Carter."

  "Hello, Salvatore."

  He looked around at his men. "A bunch of bums, that's what they are," he said sourly. "Some protection they gimme."

  "You get what you pay for."

  "Screw you, too, Carter." He shook his head in disgust. "You wanna talk in private?"

  "Yeah."

  He turned and waddled back into his office. I followed him, shutting the door in the face of the chunky young man who tried to follow us in.

  "Who's that one?" I asked Big Sal as he seated himself heavily behind his desk.

  "Him? That's my oldest son. Good boy. He got what it takes. He's not like the others. Whadda you want?"

  I made myself comfortable in a leather armchair. I took out and fit one of my gold-tipped cigarettes.

  "How big are you now, Sal?"

  He frowned. "Whatta you talkin' about?"

  "How many soldiers do you have? How big is your family?"

  "Big enough." He evaded the question.

  "I hear you're a capo di capi these days."

  Big Sal shrugged his massive shoulders. "Could be. Some people talk a lot, you know what I mean."

  "The word is you carry a lot of weight around town. They listen when you say something."

  "Could be."

  "And you're number one in numbers and loan sharking."

  He made no answer. His small, hard eyes travelled over my face like he'd never seen it before and didn't like what he saw now.

  "I want your help, Salvatore," I said. "That's why I'm here."

  He grunted. "You sure picked some way of getting here. What the shit did you do to DeGiullio?"

  "I scared him a little," I said, smiling, but without any humor.

  "You scared him a little, huh? DeGiullio's supposed to be one of my toughest men. Now, he's no good to me no more."

  "So find another one."

  "You wanted to show me you could get to me, huh? Is that it? You hadda show me no matter what, you could get through to me?"